There is a desire by service providers and consumers to distribute high-quality digitally encoded content (e.g., data, voice, and video) to both stationary and mobile device. Access to content is often restricted and users may be required to provide security credentials. Credentials such as passwords, passphrases, pattern verification, gestures and other user input may be used in security critical use cases. A credential may be composed of multiple characters such as strings consisting of letters, words, numbers, symbols, gestures, or other user input. In general, a credential with more characters is more secure than a short password.
In an effort to increase security within a computer network, a computer operating system may support passphrases up to 256 characters. It is often not convenient, however, for a user to key in a long passphrase especially if a mobile device with a small touch screen is being used. Lengthy passphrases may be replaced with a separate, and usually shorter, password. A shorter password, however, may have other issues. For example, easy passwords are weak while strong passwords are hard to remember. Moreover, certain client side application may have both a PC version and a mobile phone version to talk to the same server which is passphrase enforced. If a passphrase is enforced in the PC version, it is often hard to relax the requirements in the mobile version through use of a shorter password.